


The Ghost of You

by Chrissy24601



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types, Les Misérables - Schönberg/Boublil
Genre: 100-word challenge, Ghosts, Haunting, M/M, Valjean dies, and Javert must cope without him
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-21
Updated: 2013-08-21
Packaged: 2017-12-24 06:11:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 7
Words: 3,534
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/936342
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chrissy24601/pseuds/Chrissy24601
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Valjean dies of old age, Javert attempts to throw himself in the Seine after all. But something won't let him die... </p>
<p>Fill for Les Mis Kink Meme prompt requesting ghost!Valjean. Formatted as 35 100-word snippets, simply because I wanted to see if I could :)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

1. 

“If I’d die, would you be alright?” Valjean asked as he put his head on Javert’s chest. He’d been feeling under the weather for a few days and was surprisingly clingy.

“I know you feel weary, but you aren’t dying,” Javert chided. He put his arm around the older man and kissed his white hair. “You saved my life in so many ways. Of course I wouldn’t be alright without you.”

Valjean nuzzled his chest and fell asleep. Some time during the night, he turned away.

In the morning, Javert woke to a bed that was cold, but not empty.

 

2.

He was numb. Absent. His policeman’s instincts had steered him through the practicalities of calling a doctor, then a priest, and finally an undertaker. He hadn’t shed a tear through it all. He wasn’t supposed to. To the world, they had shared nothing more than a front door.

So no one asked him which hymns and prayers should be sung during the burial service. No one asked him which in cemetery Monsieur Fauchelevent would be buried. No one uttered any kind of condolence for his loss.

Still Javert did not cry. He felt no need to. He felt nothing whatsoever.

 

3.

Cosette cried a river when he told her of her father’s passing. He did not comfort her. He could not.

“Papa was very fond of you, monsieur,” she said, drying her red-rimmed eyes. “He once mentioned that he supported you from his income. Is that true?”

“It is true I have had no income since I was… forced to retire my position with the police,” he replied stiffly.

“Then will you please allow me to continue that arrangement? I believe Papa would want me to.”

His pride rebuked, but sensibility made him accept. Why, though? Life was empty without Valjean.

 

4.

The service was sober but elegant, the church quiet but for a handful of people. Javert kept to the back. He could not find any solace in the words of the sermon or the glow of the candles. Throughout his professional life he had seen death often enough, yet now he could not stand the thought of being close to the simple casket propped up before the altar. He felt sick to his stomach to think of the pale corpse inside of it. Valjean’s corpse.

In his mind, he heard the thundering currents of the Seine beckoning him once more.

 

5.

Javert wandered the city for hours, but eventually his feet brought him back to the Pont-au-Change. The sun had set hours ago and the waters below were dark. As dark as they had been when Valjean had pulled him out…

He felt the sting of tears that he wouldn’t admit to.

Drowning was not easy or painless, but it was clean. He pushed himself to climb up the parapet, when a hand clamped down on his shoulder and pulled him back. Angry, he turned to see who had dared to touch him. But when he did, the bridge was empty.


	2. Chapter 2

6.

He gripped the parapet with a vicious hold, determined that three times had to be the charm. Twice already he had been pulled back as soon as he tried to climb up. Both times he hadn’t caught who it was. Or what. He didn’t care. All he wanted was Valjean, and he was on the other side.

This time he made it onto the parapet. A cold, wet smell rose from the depths below. He leaned forward and—

Something hard hit him square in the jaw and knocked him backwards. He tumbled off the ledge, landing arse-first on the pavement.

 

7.

Giving up his attempt at suicide was less of a conscious decision than a realisation that it would only fail again. Apparently his subconscious was not as hollow and destitute as the rest of him, because it was obviously inventing phantom sensations to withhold him from ending his life.

That or it was a ghost. But ghosts didn’t exist.

The sun dawned over Paris and the cup of coffee in his hand. He could not wander forever, but where to go? Home? Not ‘home’; the apartment. He did not dare to call it ‘home’ without Valjean waiting for him there.

 

8.

Tired beyond fatigue, he leaned heavily against the door as he pushed it open. Cosette had told him he could live here as long as he wanted to. In all honesty, he didn’t. The apartment was as cold and empty as his heart. The void that Valjean had left behind.

His footsteps echoed in the hallway. He pretended not to hear the total absence of sound and movement – of life – in the house. Even the clock in the parlour was silent. Valjean had always kept it wound. Now he couldn’t. Perhaps it was poetic justice that the thing had stopped.

 

9.

Javert ran his hands over his face. So now what? The day stretched out ahead of him like a desert he had to survive. And beyond it another one, and another… He was fifty-five and while his existence had been harsh, it had not been as arduous as Valjean’s. A policeman’s life was often short, but being retired and fairly fit, he might have as much as twenty years ahead of him before dying of old age.

His heart sank. He had lived most of his life in solitude. Only now did he begin to understand what true loneliness was.

 

10.

For hours, the horizon beyond the walls was his sole focus of attention. Staring at it vaguely reminded him of the senseless days after Valjean had rescued him from himself. Had he felt so forlorn then?

Suddenly a loud, metallic noise disrupted the silence, ripping him from his lethargy. It sounded like the rattle of keys. Annoyed and alarmed, Javert went to investigate. The noise seemed to come from the kitchen, which should be as empty as the rest of the house was.

But if that was so, how did that steaming mug of tea get on the kitchen table?

 


	3. Chapter 3

11.

The tea smelled good. It was prepared exactly the way he liked it. Still the remnants of his professional paranoia prevailed and he poured the contents of the mug in the potted plant by the window.

But the mystery tea wasn’t all that was dodgy. He sniffed. Opening the cupboard, he winced at the stench of mouldy bread and ditto cheese. All the food had gone off. Of course it had. He hadn’t had the slightest appetite since...

A fresh-looking apple fell out of the fruit basket. Instinct overruling paranoia, he picked it up and sunk his teeth into it.

 

12.

While his heart was barren, his body still needed to eat. He took no pleasure in shopping for groceries. He kept forgetting he was buying to feed one mouth, not two. The baker noticed. So did the butcher. They asked. He didn’t answer.

Once he had stashed the food in the cleared-out pantry, it dawned on him that he hadn’t cooked a meal in twenty years. He’d always paid his portresses to make him meals and later, there had been Valjean.

Jean had been a great cook. Wonderful casseroles he’d make!

...but not anymore.

He hugged himself. “I miss you…”

 

13.

The evening dragged on. He spent most of it pacing around the parlour. How had he spent his time before? Either with work or with his partner, but now he’d lost both.

Suddenly Javert stopped short. He hadn’t lit the candles in the silver candlesticks, had he? He didn’t remember doing so, yet two steady little flames shone down from the mantelpiece.

“Either I have lost my senses, or I’m dreaming,” he muttered to himself, touching the wicks. He hissed when he burnt his fingers. Not dreaming then. Annoyed, he licked his fingers and extinguished the flames.

They refused to.

 

14.

Javert felt increasingly uneasy as the clock progressed. The candles in Valjean’s candlesticks didn’t go out and didn’t burn up. It was impossible, but he couldn’t refute it.

“If this is someone’s idea of a joke,” he growled under his breath, “I am _not_ amused!”

A ruckus in the kitchen alarmed him. When he stormed in, all drawers and cupboards hung open and a cookbook he didn’t even knew they’d had lay on the kitchen table, pages rustling.

“Who is there?!” he bellowed at full voice.

The pages turned in a non-existence breeze, stopping at a recipe for chicken casserole.

 

15.

Aggravated, Javert strode from room to room, searching for whoever had the audacity to make such poor fun of him. The tea, the candles and now _this_ , whatever it was!

By all appearances his kitchen utensils had just attempted to prepare a meal without human intervention, but he was absolutely convinced that could not be the case. There was someone in the house. There had to be! Objects didn’t move by themselves and—

His eyes widened as a blanket and a pillow silently floated down the stairs. He gaped. Perhaps he was alone after all. Alone and going stark-raving mad…


	4. Chapter 4

16.  
The blanket and pillow floated past him and into the parlour, where the pillow descended on one end, and the blanket neatly folded on the other. Javert gaped. It was true he had taken to sleeping on the sofa, because could not stomach the thought of sleeping in the bed that Valjean had died in. Still that did not in any way explain what he had just seen.

No, he must have imagined this. Hunger and grief were both known to cause hallucinations, after all. He rubbed his eyes. But when he looked, the blanket and pillow were still there.

 

17.  
His whole body was trembling now. “What is this?” He paced over to the sofa and grabbed the pillow. It was real. “This is impossible!” he growled at the universe. “What is going on?!”

Behind him, something went ‘pop’. He turned just in time to see one of the wine bottles, its cork undone, lift from the cabinet and pour its contents into one of the glasses beside it. Then the bottle settled back and the glass floated up and towards him.

Stricken, Javert staggered back. Immediately the glass veered away from him and landed on the parlour table instead.

 

18.  
Pressed against the wall, Javert slowly sank to the floor. “This isn’t happening, this isn’t happening,” he repeated under his breath. When he heard more sounds coming from the kitchen, he pulled up his knees and pressed his hands to his ears. “God, let me wake up from this nightmare!”

Then a sudden touch to his head started him into looking up.

On the table, beside the wine glass, was now a plate with a piece of bread he had bought earlier, some grapes and a few slices of the smoked ham that hung in the back of the kitchen.

 

19.  
Javert didn’t move. The fire in the hearth gradually died, leaving the still burning candles the only source of light in the room. He stared at the plate. It hadn’t moved, either.

Eventually he found a way to cope with these extraordinary events: “Screw this for a lark,” he growled, and rose to walk over to the sofa and sit down.

He regarded the food with soporific interest. His stomach rumbled while his natural paranoia screamed bloody murder. But so what if the food really was poisoned? The worst it could do was kill him, which he wouldn’t even mind.

 

20.  
He finished the meal in record time. Nothing indicated that the food was anything but fresh. Maybe the poison took more than ten minutes to work, in which case he simply would wake up dead in the morning. Like Jean…

He lay back across the sofa, head resting on the pillow. He realised he was cold again, as he’d been all his life. Except in those years with Valjean, when his lover had kept him warmer than any of his greatcoats ever could. Shivering, he curled up beneath the heavy blanket, but the wool was nothing compared to Jean’s embrace.


	5. Chapter 5

21.

He woke up to a warmth on his cheek. Had to be the morning sun shining on his face. Which meant he had slept? Yes, all night. Not a series of disorientating catnaps, which was all the rest he’d been able to find since waking up to… He didn’t remember dreaming last night, but that was a nightmarish vision he would never shake off. His body was heavy with a craving for more sleep, but he forced himself to sit up. He yawned and glanced out the window. Only then did he see that the sky outside was completely overcast.

 

22.

Javert took a deep breath. Nothing made sense anymore. The dirty plate and glass from last night had cleared themselves off the table while he slept. In fact, when he looked, he saw that the glass, perfectly clean, stood in the cabinet where it belonged. As if it’d never left. He didn’t have the strength to be surprised.

In the end, he hid his face in his hands. The empty house, the cold, the loneliness, the strange hallucinations, the memory of holding Jean’s cold body in his arms… Tears ran freely down his cheeks. What kind of life was this?

 

23.

A sudden warmth flushed him. It came on so quickly and so fiercely that he wondered if he’d been cold before because he’d been running a temperature. Could it be the food? No, he didn’t feel ill, except for the pangs in his chest whenever he thought of Valjean. And this heat, while intense, was not unpleasant. If he closed his eyes, it almost felt the way it had whenever Jean had cradled him.

But that could not be. Jean was dead. Gone. Javert snapped his eyes open, angry at himself for daydreaming.

Behind him, the clock struck the hour.

 

24.

Javert whipped around so fast he fell off the sofa. He stared wide-eyed at the face of the clock. Its pendulum swung to and thro in its usual steady rhythm. A rhythm it hadn’t had in days.

“I’m going mad,” he muttered. “There is no other explanation. It is all in my mind. It must be!”

A crash interrupted his musings. He scrambled to his feet. The noise had come from upstairs this time. Determined to find out what it was, he ran up the stairs. But before he was halfway, his shaving mirror came floating down to meet him.

 

25.

For the terror that beset him, it might as well have been the razor coming for him. He stepped back, barely catching himself when he tumbled down the last few steps in his haste to get away. The mirror floated ever closer, ever closer so he could see his own reflection in the silver.

And something else.

He froze. Behind him was only wall, but in the mirror, he saw a second face. It was vague, but the white hair and beard were instantly recognisable.

“J-jean?” Javert stammered.

The face in the mirror nodded. To Javert, the world went black.


	6. Chapter 6

26.

When Javert came to, flat out on the vestibule floor, his head hurt. Grunting and cursing, he sat up, only to stare straight into what had made him black out in the first place.

The mirror hovered before him as if it was perfectly normal for an object to hang unaided in mid-air. In the polished surface, he saw only himself. He looked as if he hadn’t eaten or slept properly in over a week. He hadn’t even changed out of the clothes he had worn to Jean’s funeral. In short, he looked the way he felt: like a mess.

 

27.

An invisible force nudged his back until he got to his feet. The mirror rose, too. He glanced at his reflection. Behind his own face, he saw the vague shapes of the face he missed so.

“Am I dreaming?” he whispered.

The ghostly image of Jean shook its head.

“How is this possible?”

No reply.

“Why are you here?”

The same force ushered him to the stairs until he reluctantly climbed them. The mirror floated along. He heard noises coming from the bedroom and stopped in his tracks. “Not in there, please…”

In the mirror, Jean only smiled at him.

 

28.

Javert’s hand trembled as he opened the bedroom door. He hadn’t touched a thing since they had taken Valjean away and he dreaded what was in here: the dank reek of death in the sheets, in the air. Except…

He stood perplexed. A pleasant morning breeze greeted him. The room was clean and tidy, the window open wide. Even the bed was made with fresh, scented linen.

“What in the world…?”

At that moment, the doors of the closet flew open and unseen hands lifted a clean change of clothes of his from the shelves, down to underwear and socks.

 

29.

He watched as the clothes arranged themselves on the bed, where his razor and shaving foam were also laid out, along with a towel.

This was something Jean would have done, Javert realised. Whenever he came home after spending days in the field, this was how his lover would welcome him back.

“Is this your way of telling me I need to wash up?” he thought out loud.

The mirror beside him wobbled and a gentle shove in his back pushed him towards the wash basin. To his surprise - or maybe not – the water in the bowl was warm.

 

30.

Regardless of the absurdity of all this, he got undressed, tossing the dirty clothes in the laundry basket. Jean’s image did not appear as he used the still floating shaving mirror what it was intended for. When he’d put the razor away, he washed himself and got dressed. A regular day suit. Nothing too fancy. It was what he would have picked himself. What Jean would have picked for him.

Or what Jean _had_ picked for him.

“The clock in the parlour. Was that you? And the food?”

In the mirror, Jean nodded.

Javert looked away, biting back his tears.

 


	7. Chapter 7

31.

Javert jogged down the stairs, the mirror still following him. The kitchen sounded lively again, but he ignored it. Instead he went over to Valjean’s writing desk and got out a few sheets of paper and a stick of writing lead, which he put on the parlour table. Then he sat down, just as a plate of breakfast drifted out of the kitchen.

Breaking off a piece of bread, Javert gestured at the writing lead. “Can you use that? Can you write?”

The stick lifted unsteadily, and tilted onto the paper. ‘ _Not very well,_ ’ it wrote in ugly, uneven letters.

 

32.

Days turned into weeks. The hallucinations did not stop. Javert was silently glad of it. How it was possible, he did not know, but Jean seemed intent to look out for him. The house was always clean and tidy, and food appeared literally by magic as long as Javert remembered to keep the pantries well-stocked. And when he didn’t, little notes of uneven letters told him what to get. It was almost as if Jean was still there. Almost.

But at night, Javert slept on the sofa; its cold loneliness his last grasp on the reality of his empty life.

 

33.

One day Javert decided that if he had lost his mind, he might as well fall all the way. He knew of this seedy little shop selling occult items. It was hidden away in an alley he had frequently patrolled when he was still a policeman, and judging by the smell of incense, it was still in business, too.

He knew what he wanted, but did not know what it was called. Fortunately a description sufficed. The thing was bloody expensive, but Javert gladly parted with the money.

Back home, he set the Ouija board up on the parlour table.

 

34.

The board did not make up for the absence of Jean’s voice. It did not laugh and could not kiss him, but at least they could speak again.

Their first conversations had been slow and uncomfortable. It took weeks for them both to get used to the board. Moving the pointer was easy enough for Jean, but to shape coherent messages took effort, since thoughts are much faster and Javert still had to follow and string the letters to words and words to sentences.

Jean was dead and he was insane, but bit by bit, those barriers faded between them.

 

35.

Weeks became months, and death ceased to have meaning. Javert slept in their bed again. He was no longer cold, and he was no longer lonely. While he huddled under the covers, he could feel Jean’s loving warmth beside him, embracing him tenderly.

Life continued as if Jean had never left. Javert recalled the bitter darkness of grief, but only like a bad dream already half-forgotten. Oh, he knew people called him crazy, but what did he care? He got to be with the man he loved for the rest of his days, and even death couldn’t tear them apart.


End file.
